N120 Hull #1 Update from Dan Streech

Announcement by Dan Streech, President of PAE to the NordhavnDreamer community today:

N120 Render

At the beginning of 2008, the super yacht market was so hot that speculators were making money just by selling their production spots at various factories around the world. By the middle of 2010, the super yacht market was devastated and desperate owners were selling the art work off their yachts to pay the slip rent and the crew. New orders were nonexistent. Now.. fast forward to 2013. The market has somewhat stabilized and there isn’t much out there for the extreme bargain hunters to look at.

In other words.. the perfect time for our magnificent N120 to be presented to the world. Well..maybe not the “perfect” time.. that would have been around 2006.. but we can’t cry over spilled milk.

The N120 team which includes Jeff Leishman, Trever Smith, Phil Arnold, David Jen, Patrick Liu, Tsai, Wan Sheu and the hundreds of staff and workers at the SCM Xiamen factory, soldered on and ignored the worldwide crisis. That team also includes dozens of venders and outside services such as Destry Darr, ABT, ABS, noise engineering, exhaust engineering, structural engineering, steering engineering and much more.

There are at this point more than 400,000 man hours invested in the building of the N120 and we have file drawers and computers FULL of design work and engineering solutions… AND.. none of what I have written so far mentions the incredible set of molds that were built for the N120.. which are an engineering marvel themselves.

Somehow however the N120 has been created and built in obscurity. Yes, there have been our advertisements, some press releases, a tab on our web site and a bit of conversation. But all of this (even our own ads) somewhat convey an “ordinary” boat and do not even come close to convincing the reader that Nordhavn’s 120 is a rival to any super yacht built anywhere in the world. That apparently will take time and the presentation of hull #1 to the world.

Which brings me to the purpose of this post. N120 #1 is essentially finished. What happens next? How do we get this 800,000 pound monster to her owner in Vancouver? Simply said, she is too big to ship. Yes, boats of this size are routinely shipped aboard Dockwise and other “dry dock” type of ships, but none of those ships call in that part of the world, so we would be left with conventional deck cargo shipping which is out of the question financially and logistically. The N120 has non-stop range from China to Vancouver and she travels within 3 knots of what the freighters travel at.. so, we will just “drive er home”.

N120 #1 will be launched into the test tank in approximately three weeks where she will sit for about a month as the systems are brought to life and tested. Then towards the end of May, she will be launched into Xiamen harbor to commence her ocean sea trials and ABS certification. We hope to depart for the trip to Vancouver around July 1.

Jim Leishman will be Captain of the voyage and there will be a team of PAE and SCM personal on board including Jeff Leishman, David Jen and others. The target is to make a quick and efficient non-stop passage to Vancouver running as fast as possible using the classic fuel management practices that we used on the ATW and that hundreds of other Nordhavn owners have used over the years on long passages. If the passage is non-stop as we hope, it will take 24-28 days “depending”.

We are crazed with excitement with the imminent arrival and unveiling of the N120. It couldn’t come at a better time. You will notice that the brokerage section of the Nordhavn web site is splashed with “red” (which means sales activity) and there have been two new boat LOIs signed this week. With 4 dreary years seemingly behind us, the time seems right to present our masterpiece.